North Carolina Wills and Inventories

Description

Like the author’s better known Abstract of North Carolina Wills, here is a critical source on the pre-Revolutionary families of the Tarheel State. The work consists of the full text of 200 wills and 50 inventories for the period reaching to the 1760s, when the recording of wills became the responsibility of North Carolina’s counties. These wills and inventories give the most accurate illustration of industrial and social life in the colony of North Carolina obtainable and furnish to students of the state an invaluable source of information about conditions prior to the Revolution.

Genealogists will appreciate the fact that many of the testators whose verbatim wills appear here were progenitors of North Carolina’s most prolific and accomplished families–virtually all of whom would figure significantly in North Carolina history for generations to come. While too numerous to enumerate here, the 250 testators and bequeathers of inventories featured in the volume–from Abraham Adams to William Yeates–are conveniently found in the index. The work also indexes names by charitable bequest, land entailed, plantations, etc.